On Tuesday August 31, 2022, Mikhail Gorbachev died aged 91.
I was born the year before the fall of the Berlin wall. For me, the death of Gorbachev attests to the freshness of the Soviet Union’s disintegration (and the subsequent birth of the modern Russian Federation).
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| Putin paying tribute to Gorbachev. |
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Contrary to popular belief, the Soviet Union was not a communist state. It was a socialist state. As per Marxist-Leninism, the official ideology of the Soviet Union was that communism would emerge after socialism. The Soviet Union was in the process of strengthening socialism to establish communism. By the late 80s, the erstwhile approach was yielding nothing. Democracy and glasnost were tools that the last General Secretary hoped would strengthen the USSR, the Communist Party and “socialism” – as opposed to confronting them.
Much of Gorbachev’s legacy – as the unlucky warden – has the ring of Prometheus to it. But Prometheus acted deliberately, consciously; and was subsequently punished for his actions.
Gorbachev’s reforms did not intentionally collapse the USSR. Gorbachev was always intent on bolstering the Union in some “reformed” shape under some commensurate socialist economic system. It became a comedy of errors.
Gorbachev started the glasnost and perestroika as a genuine breakthrough but which utterly backfired. Like a decaying prison’s new chief warden setting up a system of democratic management and enfranchising prisoners to choose their own guards and alarm system. The failure was the dearth of required administrative skills to “westernise” the soviet state. The reforms began to pick apart the centralised economy without creating some alternative ‘institution’. Also, we shouldn’t forget socialism’s enduring systemic bug: it cannot cope with the complexity of dispersed knowledge in a developed nation.
Nevertheless, the reforms unleashed political movements beyond Gorbachev’s control (which antagonised hard-line members of the nomenklatura), and the Union collapsed.
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On international relations, Gorbachev was promised that NATO would respect Russian security concerns. Instead, NATO expanded and installed military bases in Eastern Europe (the Union’s ex satellite states) and those military bases have thereafter been pointing at Russia. Russia was rebuffed from joining NATO when the Clinton administration harboured a more anti-Russian disposition than President Reagan.
Today, the West celebrates Gorbachev as a hero. In some cases, that may be justified. He was responsible for the peaceful end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, if one adopts a more expansive purview, beyond the West, the breakup of the Soviet Union led to many deaths in the Warsaw Pact countries. Notably, Russia-Chechnya, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Russia-Georgia, Russia-Ukraine, Russia-Moldova. The Yugoslav conflicts arose mostly as a consequence of rising nationalism in Serbia and ethno-religious tensions; but it’s worth asking whether the lack of Soviet influence meant there was no power to keep them in check.
The post-Gorbachev crumbling state of poverty and crime was dire. The destruction and mendicancy of Russia was probably felt by Russians to have been met with celebration in the West. It probably ushered a strong FSB to take some charge of the state, fashioning an oligarchy, with the appointment of figures like Putin.
Max Hastings writes that “Gorbachev failed, and a prominent legacy of his failure is the 21st-century tsardom created by Vladimir Putin.” To the extent that that is true, I suspect that the West has some blame in the rise of Putin in the humiliation of the post-cold war Russia when they could have been assisted and helped (and invited to be part of the NATO’s security aegis).
Nevertheless, he evinced considerable restraint in the use of violence in the implosion of the Soviet Union, particularly vis-à-vis Eastern Europe.
It’s striking that the USSR went from Stalin to Gorbachev in 32 years.
He deserved a legacy in the hands of someone better than Yeltsin as a successor.
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